Exploring Grand Staircase & Escalante

This morning I shot some balancing rocks at sunrise and then returned to the bus to start backing up my photos. The next thing I knew, the doorbell rang (yes I have one) and there stands two friends who just happened to see me parked and thought "I wonder if that's Ben's bus". I've been found! It turns out that a few of the people who make PhotoshopWorld happen have decided to fly out early to explore the Southwest. They were passing by on their way to Monument Valley and I might get a chance to meet up with them when they come back to Page, AZ.

I spent yesterday exploring Yellow Rock, Grosvenor Arch and a few other stops along Cottonwood Canyon Road. Today, I'll be exploring Toadstool trail and taking a break to get organized for PhotoshopWorld and spend time trying to figure out how to load topo maps onto my handheld GPS.

Comments

[Dan]

Great photo. Any guidance on how you created this multi shot treatment?

[Ben Willmore]

Dan,

I shot the pano handheld and wasn't trying to have them each rotated, they just turned out that way. I aligned them using Tools>Photoshop>Photo Merge in Bridge (just make sure you actually rotate each image because photo merge can't do that automatically). I also used the Keep as Layers feature so that photo merge didn't attempt to blend the images together.

After the image was open in Photoshop, I clicked on one of the layers and added a white stroke Layer Style (also known as layer effects), a drop shadow and an black outer glow (with it's blending mode set to multiply instead of the default which is screen)... I had to mess with the Size and Spread settings quite a bit to get the glow to show up beyond the edge of the stroke... but just a little so the edge of the white stroke would separate from the white background.

I then Control-clicked (Mac), or Right-clicked (Win) on the layer and chose Copy Layer Style, held Shift and clicked on the bottom layer to get them all selected, control-clicked again on a layer and chose Paste Layer Style to get the drop shadow/stroke/glow to apply to all the other layers. Then I used the crop tool to add some extra space around the image so none of the drop shadows were being cut off.

Hope that helps.

-Ben

[Dan]

Thanks for the explanation. You did a great job!